What Does Mark 4:3 Mean?
Hear and respond! Look, a sower went out to sow.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow:THE KEY
The sower and the sowing share one Greek root: what goes out is already bound to the act of planting.
THE MEANING
The call to hear arrives beside an image you can see: a sower is going out to scatter seed. What reaches you is not a finished harvest but a beginning, carried outward with the possibility of taking root.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the idea that a word matters only once its result is visible: the sowing is already underway before the harvest can be seen.
THE ROOT
σπείρων
speírōn
GROWS FROM
σπειρ-
speir-
To sow, scatter seed.
“sower” in this verse is speírōn. The verse repeats the same stem first for the person sowing, then for what he goes out to do. Mark later names the seed as the word, letting you hear the word as something released outward to take root.
ALSO GROWS
sporá: Sowing; seed.
σπορά
The same word family holds both the act of sowing and what is sown, binding the going-out to the seed’s beginning.
diaspeírō: To scatter abroad, disperse.
διασπείρω
The root also describes scattering outward, opening the verse’s seed image into a movement that carries beyond its starting place.
THE PATTERN
A word goes out like seed, and its work unfolds as it takes root and bears fruit.
So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but shall do what I delight in, and shall break through in the thing to which I sent it.Now the parable is this. The seed is the word of God.THE THREAD
The sower sows the word.Here the same sowing root returns, and the seed is named as the word. The image in verse 3 is already showing how the word reaches you: going out like seed, ready to take root.
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